Intel’s Revised X25-M Delivers on its Promise of Improved Performance

In case you happened to have missed it, Intel launched the industry’s first 34nm-based solid-state disks on Tuesday, and there are a few reasons to be excited. First, there are significant price-drops, with the 80GB version to sell for around $225 (/1,000) and the 160GB drive for $440. What’s impressive about these refined prices is that the original 80GB was released less than a year ago. In that time, we’ve seen the density double, yet the price lowered.

We’re still awaiting our copy of the 160GB model (the joys of living in Canada!), but we expect it here within the next few days. Once I receive it, I’ll give it some preliminary testing and post the results. As you’re probably aware, we haven’t done storage content in a while, but that will soon change. We’re still ironing through the details of our CPU/Motherboard methodologies, but once done, storage will follow. So you can expect a lot more HDD/SSD goodness in the coming months.

While I await our copy of the drive, I couldn’t help but check out Anand’s initial findings on the drive, and some of them are quite interesting. Probably most interesting is that rather than stick to 8GB memory chips as on the previous 160GB model, the latest drives use 16GB. Because of that, only one side is occupied, meaning that if Intel had wanted to, they could likely make a 320GB version of the drive right now. Don’t get too excited though… that’s not likely to happen for a while.

In initial tests, Intel still dominates the sequential read tests, and also the random read/writes, and despite its 70MB/s rated write speed, a synthetic test showed it to hit 78.1MB/s. Still, even with that bump, Intel’s drives still fall well below the competition, unless we’re talking about their SLC-based X25-E. Luckily for Intel though (not that they are likely too worried), it’s the random read/write performance that truly matters, at least at this point in time.

The real strength of the Intel drives is in its random, small file, read/write performance. Here we see a 10% improvement in random read performance over the 1st gen drives, putting the new X25-M ahead of even the X25-E. Now there are obvious lifespan benefits you get from an SLC drive that the G2 can’t match, but for a desktop user this thing is even better than the X25-E.